Reading options

Text size, colours and reader mode are all handled by your browser and device. We do not offer a settings menu of our own. Story pages have a Listen button, which appears only when your browser supports it and your device has a voice installed locally. The pages themselves need no JavaScript, so with Tor Browser's security level set to Safest, the text of each piece stays readable.

Text size, colours and reader mode

In a desktop browser you can raise the default font size in its settings, and the whole site scales with it, or simply zoom the page. On iPhone you can change the text size of a page in Safari, and Chrome on Android has text scaling under Accessibility in its settings. When your device switches to dark mode, the site switches to dark colours too. If you turn on Increase Contrast in Settings > Accessibility > Display & Text Size on iPhone, secondary text, links and dividers get darker, and the layout stays the same.

If you only want the story itself, turn on your browser's reader mode. In Firefox's Reader View, story pages show only the story, without the source list and footer.

Listening

Story pages have a Listen button below the "Also in" line under the headline. It reads the headline, summary and story aloud with a voice built into your device, and highlights the paragraph being read. Tap Options next to it to pick the voice and speed; your choice stays in this browser for the next story and is not sent to any server. It only uses voices that run on your device, so the text is not sent to any server, and it does not appear when your device has no such voice. Tor Browser turns off the browser's speech feature, and the onion version does not include the button.

An iPhone comes with small, basic-quality voices. To download better-sounding ones, go to Settings > Accessibility > Read & Speak > Voices and choose a language and voice. These downloads can be over 100 MB, so connect to Wi-Fi first. Reload the story page afterwards and the Listen button will use the best-quality version.

If you do not see the button, use the read-aloud feature built into your browser or operating system. Safari on iPhone has Listen to Page, and story pages are marked up so it reads the story itself and skips the source list and footer. Whether the option appears depends on the page's language and your device's language settings. If it is missing, turn on Speak Screen in Settings > Accessibility > Read & Speak on iPhone, which reads everything on screen, header and footer included. Some browsers read aloud with online voices, which sends the text to the browser vendor's servers; if that matters to you, choose a voice that runs on your device.

Links to a passage

To share a particular sentence, select it in Chrome, Edge or Safari and choose Copy link to highlight (Chrome and Edge) or Copy Link with Highlight (Safari) from the right-click or long-press menu. The link opens the page scrolled to that passage, with the passage highlighted. The highlight is described in the part of the link after #, which your browser never sends to the server, so the site cannot see which sentence you shared.